Literature Review
Children are the future, so it is key to society to understand their physiological, linguistic, cognitive and social development so as to facilitate their optimal development. Among the varied biological and psychological aspects of development, children’s language development is of special interest and significance to psychologists and linguists as language helps bridge the information gap between generations and sustain cultures and civilizations, and a more profound knowledge of first language 留学生论文网acquisition helps understand the nature of language learning. The child must attain competence in four main areas of language development--phonology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics, no matter what language or dialect he or she speaks. A growing number of studies have been conducted in the field of the relationship between semantics and syntax, bringing forth various theories and strategies that aim to map out a sequence of states that comprise child development, the continuity and discontinuity of which is one of the major controversies of developmental psychology which has been concerned with infants and children since its beginning. As this essay aims to provide some insights into the relationships between syntax and semantics of a Chinese child’s language by testing the two alternative hypotheses of all-or-none change by stages and incremental change, I will describe some illustrative studies in some detail.
In the field of child language, findings about how children learn the semantic and syntactic properties of new words are diverse and thus lead to different hypotheses about the relationship between semantics and syntax. One may wonder how children, when faced with an infinite number of hypotheses which are consistent with a finite set of data, know which one is most acceptable. Do they rely on the syntactic privileges of occurrence to deduce the meanings, or the semantic properties of words and mechanisms that imply non-linguistic cognitive inference? In Brown(1957), Naigles(1990), Bloom and Kelemen (1995) and Bloom(1994), children were repeatedly found to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words by relying on the syntactic contexts in which they were used, thus consolidating the “syntactic bootstrapping” hypothesis which posits that syntax helps language learning. Children impose syntactic categories on words and syntactic environment is crucial for language development. In Gropen et al (1991) and Imai and Haryu (1999), children had no syntactic resources to fall back on and still could infer the meaning of unfamiliar words by resorting to other non-linguistic constraints, thus lending support to the “semantic bootstrapping” hypothesis which posit that semantics help language learning. Children infer the meaning of words from the observation of events and innate knowledge of rules, without grammatical information and acquisition of syntax. This hypothesis recognizes that semantics and syntax are related by universal and innate linking rules which do not have to be learned and that the child uses the semantics to infer the syntax.#p#分页标题#e#

It can be seen that these disagreements about the extent to which children's early meanings and expressive words arise directly from adult input as opposed to intrinsic factors relating to their cognitive functions reflect the discrepancies between rationalsim and nativism to some degree. Since both hypotheses are backed up with experiment findings, it is safe to point out the interplay of both upon the child’s language development. But there are still some unanswered questions in my search of the studies in this field: So far the experiments are mainly done about the acquisition of verbs and nouns in English, do other parts of speech produce similar results? Chinese is syntactically quite different from English, so may the similar rules apply? Under what circumstances is the relationship between syntax and semantics violated? At what stage may either of the two be playing a bigger role? Do they weight equally at the major stages of child development or does any of the two overplay the other at certain stages? As some critical information for language learning is laid during the pre-linguistic period, when the infant builds up an understanding of basic notions such as objects, actions and spatial relations, these pre-established concepts first serve to guide the child’s generalization of the form to new concepts, and the child gradually develops its syntactic competence and learns to map linguistic forms onto concepts when it searches for the linguistic forms e.g. content words, grammatical morphemes and word order etc. that will allow them to encode their ideas in an attempt to communicate in words. So how can one know for sure the clear-cut distinction of the roles played by semantics and syntax when the child determines the meaning of a new word? Is this development continuous or discountinous?

Patrick Suppes (1973) criticized the Piagetian stage theory and argued that“language development at the level ordinarily discussed by psychologists proceeds by http://www.ukthesis.org/Thesis_Tips/Reference/Literature_Review/continuous change and not by stages. The case for stages is to be found in the microlevel of the learning of individual items of great simplicity……as was demonstrated amply in the early 1960s in the enormous literature on this subject in mathematical learning theory. There is, in contrast, no seriouse evidence in support of stages on the scale of a child's language performance between the ages of 18 months and 36 months.” In P. Suppes, Leveille and Smith(1974) the relationship between syntax and semantics of children’s language was studied by testing the alternative developmental models of an incremental or discrete-stage sort. In the data they analyzed, the continuous incremental model is supported more by the data, although neither model, given its simplicity, has as good a fit as could be expected. In the data six distinct time sections were analyzed with the equation and figures. Once again, the debate over nativism and rationalism arises again. According to Suppes, a child is obviously equipped with an enormously flexible apparatus for perception and learning, much of it clearly fine tuned to what he will hear and ready for language learning. But he admits that there is too little theoretical definiteness about the way in whlch children acquire language to parcel out the variance between genetic endowment and environmental influences. The extensive empirical work which has been done on children's language over the past few years seems to weigh very little on either side of the issues, except perhaps to discourage premature closure on any simple theoretical position. Mathematical ability acquisition is different from language acquisition. Perhaps arithmetic should replace language as the new nativist stronghold. His research seems to have answered some of my questions, but as he himself acknowledges, it is still an open research problem for the future to characterize in a more recise and satisfactory manner the actual development of children's language. The models and theories we have at hand at present are clearly too simplistic and too simple to do an adequate job. I hope to bring clarity to the issues with my research into the syntax and semantics of a 2-year-old Chinese girl by conducting a longitudinal research.#p#分页标题#e#
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Suppes, P., Leveille, M. and Smith, R. L. (1974) Developmental models of a child’s French syntax. Tech. Rep. 243, Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University.
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